In my entry for January 6 I more or less promised to start posting at least two or three times a week. It didn't quite register with me that this was Winter Quarter, which here, as at many university departments, is an unusually hectic time. To the usual jobs of teaching and research are added the evaluation of applications for graduate study and the evaluation of candidates for various faculty positions, not just in this department but frequently in others; e.g., Comparative Studies.
On the graduate application front: I have so far read through about sixty-five graduate applications in military history and early American history. The military historians met yesterday to discuss the applicants we'd like to put forward to the graduate studies committee. The early Americanists will meet on Friday. By Monday we have to prepare and submit supporting arguments for each applicant we nominate for admission and funding. I know I'm writing up two for the military field and probably more for the early American field.
On the job candidate front, I have so far attended two meals with candidates and gone to four job talks, with the bulk of the finalists for our five searches still to come. By the time we get done with the process, I will likely have attended three or four more meals and eight or nine more job talks, to say nothing of reading the relevant files. And of course there'll be the usual round of informal consultations and formal meetings as the department goes about the task of selecting the people to whom we'll extend offers.
This is in no way a complaint. In many ways these kinds of tasks are rewarding. Many of the applicants for graduate study have led interesting lives and done interesting work. The job talks, for their part, invariably provide a window into some intriguing historical problem I hadn't previously considered. But it all eats up time. And more to the point, it isn't stuff I can blog about, because so much of the process needs to be held in confidence.
Still, from time to time things crop up that are blogworthy. For instance, on top of all the stuff I've mentioned above, I also prepared a grant proposal to support another conference, this one on war and globalization, with a critique of The Pentagon's New Map as one of the rationales and a focused issue in the Journal of World History as the main projected product. That went into the hopper last Friday; I'll hear the verdict sometime in April, and if it's funded I'd like to convene the conference in the spring of 2006.
Then too, last Friday I spent an hour being interviewed on something called Civil War Talk Radio, which isn't disseminated by radio at all but rather by streaming audio on the web. An acquaintance of mine is the host, his regular guest had to cancel out a couple of days before the scheduled broadcast--er, webcast--and he asked me to fill in. Our point of departure was whether and to what extent the Civil War deserves to be called a total war, though the conversation ranged more widely than that. The promotional copy reads that I talk about "the motivations and actions of the men who fought for the North. Was the Civil War a total war? How did Northern soldiers treat the civilians they encountered, both free and enslaved? What racial attitudes characterized white Northern soldiers?" I also got asked what is apparently a standard question given to all guests; essentially: If you could go back in time and talk to one person in an effort to avert the Civil War, to what year would you go and with whom would you speak? If you're interested in my response to that and other burning questions, check out the broadcast.
Blog Them Out of the Stone Age: Toward A Broader Vision of Military History and National Security Affairs
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Bad Acts at Bad Axe
This entry is graphics intensive, and Blogger (the software that runs War Historian) doesn't lend itself to that, so I've posted it on the old site. You'll find it here.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Blasts from the Past
The holidays are over and I'm back in the classroom. This quarter I continue to facilitate a graduate research seminar. I'm also teaching History 151, the first half of the American history survey.
Everyone in my department, even the stars with endowed professorships, is required to teach at least one "service course" each year. This year History 151 is mine, and it's the service course I teach most often, though I have sometimes taught History 152, the second half of the American history survey, or History 398, Introduction to Historical Thought. And in keeping with my interest in the global history of war, I've volunteered next year to teach History 181, the first half of the world civilization survey.
With the exception of History 398, which to my surprise was a course I discovered I intensely disliked, despite favorable reviews from my students, I enjoy teaching the service courses more than the upper-division courses in my specialty. That's because I get to deal with lots of non-history majors, which is to say a much broader spectrum of university students. It's also because I know less about every aspect of the material, so that the courses give me a chance to learn new things--if not new material then at least new ways to think about the material. By contrast, when I teach, say, the Civil War and Reconstruction the experience is less satisfying. I know so much more about the period than I can convey even in a ten-week course. Consequently I feel as if I'm perpetually skimming the surface.
A challenge of teaching non-majors is that frequently they enter my classes thinking that history is just names and dates, or else a kind of pageant--colorful perhaps but remote. My job is at least partly to convince them--through example, not just special pleading--that history is relevant to their lives.
Certainly it's relevant to understanding current events. I never read a story on the current situation in Iraq without being forcibly reminded of the American experience with Reconstruction, 1865-1877. In this I'm hardly alone. In a previous entry I've noted that strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman drew parallels between Iraq and Reconstruction in a speech given last fall at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So have several others, among them Bertram Wyatt-Brown in a newspaper op-ed piece, Mackubin Thomas Owens in a column for National Review Online, and Sanford V. Levinson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Just run a Google search with the terms "Iraq" and "Reconstruction," along with something specific to the American Reconstruction era--"1877" or "Ku Klux Klan." You'll find these and more.
The one that is my favorite, at least in terms of something I could use in class, is an op-ed piece by novelist Cynthia Bass that appeared recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's an excerpt:
Everyone in my department, even the stars with endowed professorships, is required to teach at least one "service course" each year. This year History 151 is mine, and it's the service course I teach most often, though I have sometimes taught History 152, the second half of the American history survey, or History 398, Introduction to Historical Thought. And in keeping with my interest in the global history of war, I've volunteered next year to teach History 181, the first half of the world civilization survey.
With the exception of History 398, which to my surprise was a course I discovered I intensely disliked, despite favorable reviews from my students, I enjoy teaching the service courses more than the upper-division courses in my specialty. That's because I get to deal with lots of non-history majors, which is to say a much broader spectrum of university students. It's also because I know less about every aspect of the material, so that the courses give me a chance to learn new things--if not new material then at least new ways to think about the material. By contrast, when I teach, say, the Civil War and Reconstruction the experience is less satisfying. I know so much more about the period than I can convey even in a ten-week course. Consequently I feel as if I'm perpetually skimming the surface.
A challenge of teaching non-majors is that frequently they enter my classes thinking that history is just names and dates, or else a kind of pageant--colorful perhaps but remote. My job is at least partly to convince them--through example, not just special pleading--that history is relevant to their lives.
Certainly it's relevant to understanding current events. I never read a story on the current situation in Iraq without being forcibly reminded of the American experience with Reconstruction, 1865-1877. In this I'm hardly alone. In a previous entry I've noted that strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman drew parallels between Iraq and Reconstruction in a speech given last fall at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So have several others, among them Bertram Wyatt-Brown in a newspaper op-ed piece, Mackubin Thomas Owens in a column for National Review Online, and Sanford V. Levinson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Just run a Google search with the terms "Iraq" and "Reconstruction," along with something specific to the American Reconstruction era--"1877" or "Ku Klux Klan." You'll find these and more.
The one that is my favorite, at least in terms of something I could use in class, is an op-ed piece by novelist Cynthia Bass that appeared recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's an excerpt:
It has a familiar ring: The war is won. The United States moves quickly to eliminate the old repressive regime, setting up new democratic institutions and holding elections. U.S. troops remain to ensure a smooth transition to democracy, but it's assumed that this transition will be both peaceful and swift, and that a prolonged military presence will not be necessary. Tragically, this is not to be.Much of the population sees the United States as an occupier. A violent insurgency develops, undermining the new institutions. The United States is unable to win over the hearts and minds of the people, or crush the insurgency. Finally, after more than a decade, with both Washington and the nation losing interest, the effort is abandoned. Troops are withdrawn, the new institutions collapse, and an evil, repressive regime emerges in its place.
A vision of Iraq's future? No. Not yet.
It's a short history of a previous U.S. effort to introduce democracy to a defeated but restive population in the American South, after the Civil War. Optimists looking for hope in the Iraqi situation repeatedly point to the successful nation building performed with Japan and Germany after World War II.
But the situation in Iraq differs from that in post-war Germany and Japan in one vital respect: the view of the future. Once the war ended, Germany and Japan immediately realized they faced a severe threat from an expansionist Soviet Union. Embracing American-style democracy and accepting U.S. hegemony was an easy choice compared with the possibility of becoming a permanent Soviet satellite.
In today's sole-superpower world, no such outside threat faces Iraq. In fact, many Iraqis see America as the expansionist bully, with their country as possible victim.
Which returns us to the South after the Civil War. . . .
You'll find the complete column here.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
The Rebel Jesus
An irony of this blog is that its inspiration came from my encounter with a gifted scholar who implicitly viewed military history as the servant of an oppressive political order, that it has explored most closely such things as the potential for a postcolonial or antiwar approach to the subject, but that its first year ends with a decision to engage with what has been considered (though Tom Barnett would contest the characterization) a neoconservative vision of U.S. national security policy.
I have wondered for several weeks now what Michael Hames-Garcia (the "Marco" of my first entry) would make of this blog if he were to read it. I suppose I could ask him, though the request would make an enormous demand on his time. I would imagine that, however useful the journey has been to me, from his perspective I haven't gotten that far--that I've barely scraped the surface of postcolonialism, for instance--and that, whatever my good intentions, I really just don't get it. But on second thought that's probably just projection. From my (admittedly quite limited) acquaintance with Michael, I had the impression that he had a gentle soul and a generous spirit.
I guess my basic conclusion so far is that the field of military history is too closely and--worse--unreflectively connected to the elites who create, sustain, defend, and benefit from a political system based on domination through the threat, veiled or blatant, of violence. I think it tends to follow an agenda congenial to that elite, to ask the questions that this elite would ask, to limit the realm of potential answers to those acceptable to this elite, and, most importantly, to block from consideration questions that would threaten this elite.
Individual military historians are entitled to follow their own interests and incorporate their own political viewpoints. But I can think of no intellectual reason for military history, as a field of inquiry, not to turn the status quo on its head and identify with the dominated, not the dominators. Or better, to take a step back and examine issues of war and peace from both perspectives. Or better yet, to step back far enough to question the morality and efficacy of solving human problems by killing human beings.
One of the beauties of scholarship is that it's a collaborative enterprise: a community of those dedicated to the life of the mind. Members of that community should listen to the voices of everyone in it but nobody can adopt all the potential postures and points of view at once. I'm trying to expand my ability to listen, yet I know that at the end of the day, temperament if nothing else will draw me back to what for me is an instinctive itch to build bridges of communication between people who don't usually talk to one another. Among other things, that means I'll probably never adopt an antiwar perspective so strongly as to reject engagement with the strategic policy-making community.
All the same, the older I get, the more I question the things I was raised to believe, especially the idea that war is legitimate, but also the idea that the United States is all about truth, justice, and a square deal for everybody. The United States is, like any other society, a community of flawed human beings. Its government, like every other government, tends in aggregate to manifest a lower degree of morality than its component individuals. I'm firmly with the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on that one. Somebody once asked him about the title of his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr replied that, strictly speaking, it should have been Immoral Man and Even More Immoral Society.
Of course, as soon as I say that I'm reminded that you can't breathe a word of criticism, in some quarters, about our policies and their effects without being told that you don't love your country and you must be one of the "blame America first" crowd. Too many Americans on the left and on the right have raised to an art form the instant putdown and the ad hominem attack. I'm too much of an historian to believe that things used to be better--after all, I cut my teeth on the Civil War. All the same, the quality of public discourse could stand much improvement.
I'm heartily tired of the Jane-you-ignorant-slut, you-shot-my-dog, you-fucked-my-wife tone of what passes for political discussion in most TV and radio talk shows and most books and articles dealing with current affairs. I can't decide which I hate the worst: people who talk that way because they mean it or people who talk that way as a kind of performance art. The other day I stumbled across a FOX News round table discussion--it may have been "Hannity & Colmes", because I remember seeing Colmes--in which the participants were batting around the recent Mosul attack as if it were a beach ball. I'm serious. They were smiling and having a gay old time.
And there were good men dead.
And millions of lives in the balance.
And we're getting to the point--hell, we're well past it--where we think that kind of gabfest is okay.
I'm not sure that I'll get a chance to post another entry before the holiday, so I'll take this chance to wish everyone a merry Christmas (or to hope that you have/had a happy Hannukah, joyful Kwanza, contemplative Ramadan, or dysfunctional Festivus).
I leave you with the lyrics of a song that seems appropriate to both the season and this entry. They're by Jackson Browne.
I have wondered for several weeks now what Michael Hames-Garcia (the "Marco" of my first entry) would make of this blog if he were to read it. I suppose I could ask him, though the request would make an enormous demand on his time. I would imagine that, however useful the journey has been to me, from his perspective I haven't gotten that far--that I've barely scraped the surface of postcolonialism, for instance--and that, whatever my good intentions, I really just don't get it. But on second thought that's probably just projection. From my (admittedly quite limited) acquaintance with Michael, I had the impression that he had a gentle soul and a generous spirit.
I guess my basic conclusion so far is that the field of military history is too closely and--worse--unreflectively connected to the elites who create, sustain, defend, and benefit from a political system based on domination through the threat, veiled or blatant, of violence. I think it tends to follow an agenda congenial to that elite, to ask the questions that this elite would ask, to limit the realm of potential answers to those acceptable to this elite, and, most importantly, to block from consideration questions that would threaten this elite.
Individual military historians are entitled to follow their own interests and incorporate their own political viewpoints. But I can think of no intellectual reason for military history, as a field of inquiry, not to turn the status quo on its head and identify with the dominated, not the dominators. Or better, to take a step back and examine issues of war and peace from both perspectives. Or better yet, to step back far enough to question the morality and efficacy of solving human problems by killing human beings.
One of the beauties of scholarship is that it's a collaborative enterprise: a community of those dedicated to the life of the mind. Members of that community should listen to the voices of everyone in it but nobody can adopt all the potential postures and points of view at once. I'm trying to expand my ability to listen, yet I know that at the end of the day, temperament if nothing else will draw me back to what for me is an instinctive itch to build bridges of communication between people who don't usually talk to one another. Among other things, that means I'll probably never adopt an antiwar perspective so strongly as to reject engagement with the strategic policy-making community.
All the same, the older I get, the more I question the things I was raised to believe, especially the idea that war is legitimate, but also the idea that the United States is all about truth, justice, and a square deal for everybody. The United States is, like any other society, a community of flawed human beings. Its government, like every other government, tends in aggregate to manifest a lower degree of morality than its component individuals. I'm firmly with the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on that one. Somebody once asked him about the title of his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr replied that, strictly speaking, it should have been Immoral Man and Even More Immoral Society.
Of course, as soon as I say that I'm reminded that you can't breathe a word of criticism, in some quarters, about our policies and their effects without being told that you don't love your country and you must be one of the "blame America first" crowd. Too many Americans on the left and on the right have raised to an art form the instant putdown and the ad hominem attack. I'm too much of an historian to believe that things used to be better--after all, I cut my teeth on the Civil War. All the same, the quality of public discourse could stand much improvement.
I'm heartily tired of the Jane-you-ignorant-slut, you-shot-my-dog, you-fucked-my-wife tone of what passes for political discussion in most TV and radio talk shows and most books and articles dealing with current affairs. I can't decide which I hate the worst: people who talk that way because they mean it or people who talk that way as a kind of performance art. The other day I stumbled across a FOX News round table discussion--it may have been "Hannity & Colmes", because I remember seeing Colmes--in which the participants were batting around the recent Mosul attack as if it were a beach ball. I'm serious. They were smiling and having a gay old time.
And there were good men dead.
And millions of lives in the balance.
And we're getting to the point--hell, we're well past it--where we think that kind of gabfest is okay.
I'm not sure that I'll get a chance to post another entry before the holiday, so I'll take this chance to wish everyone a merry Christmas (or to hope that you have/had a happy Hannukah, joyful Kwanza, contemplative Ramadan, or dysfunctional Festivus).
I leave you with the lyrics of a song that seems appropriate to both the season and this entry. They're by Jackson Browne.
THE REBEL JESUS
Original recording from the Chieftain's album The Bells Of Dublin
The streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants' windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
Will be gathering around the hearths and tables
Giving thanks for all God's graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus
They call him by the "Prince of Peace"
And they call him by "The Saviour"
And they pray to him upon the sea
And in every bold endeavor
As they fill his churches with their pride and gold
And their faith in him increases
But they've turned the nature that I worshipped in
From a temple to a robber's den
In the words of the rebel Jesus
We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus
But pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgement
For I've no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus.
(c) 1991 BMG MUSIC
Earn Millions for Your Organization!
How?
By answering your email when someone offers your organization millions of dollars.
Some months ago a woman living in my home state of Ohio unexpectedly inherited a substantial estate when two of her relatives passed away. (Apparently she had no idea the relatives were so wealthy, so the inheritance came as a considerable shock.) The woman decided that part of the inheritance--several million dollars--should be given to charity, and she gave her two daughters the job of choosing suitable charitable causes and handling the actual transfers. As people who value higher education, the daughters approached several colleges and universities. They did so, straightforwardly enough, by going to the web sites of various such institutions and emailing the appropriate offices to express their interest in making a bequest.
Several places, they discovered, didn't even so much as hit the reply button to ask if they really meant it.
Luckily for Ohio State, a development officer working for our university got such an email--which, trust me, is an unusual way to hear of a potential bequest of that magnitude--and did hit the reply button. Which set in motion a chain of events that culminated last week in a meeting between myself, the heir, her two daughters, my colleague Peter Hahn, and several OSU development officers with a holy-cow-we've-hit-the-jackpot gleam in their eyes.
The heir and her daughters--I'll call them, respectively, Mary, Molly, and Maureen Benefactor--were pleasant and utterly down-to-earth. I have had enough involvement with development matters to know that usually people who make sizeable bequests do so only after an elaborate courtship by the university. The courtship generally involves a series of meetings and dinners with important university officials and dog-and-pony shows in which professors like me give special presentations designed to showcase the talents of the faculty--the talk I gave in October on "The Long Shadow of Sherman's March" was just such a presentation. The courtship often goes on for months, frequently a couple of years, before the potential donor is ready to sign on the dotted line.
The Benefactor family weren't like this. They had something they had decided to do and they just wanted to do it. Mary sat quietly while Molly and Maureen talked briefly about the bequests they had made earlier that morning to the veterinary school and to physical anthropology--as OSU alumni they had had earlier personal involvements with both entities. They were also interested in making a bequest to history--military history, to be exact--as a way to honor their brother who is an officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
I was in the room for obvious reasons. Peter was there in his capacity as department Vice Chair--the Chair himself would have been at the meeting except that he was out of the country. Peter talked a few minutes about the strengths of our department, noting, for example, that it was one of a handful of departments at OSU to win a Selective Investment grant: an award of several million dollars given by the university to departments identified as being so close to the top tier of excellence at the national level that an infusion of a few senior faculty hires would vault them into that tier. We got such a grant a few years ago. The infusion process--which has gotten us the likes of Kevin Boyle, Cynthia Brokaw, John Brooke, Alice Conklin, David Cressy, Alan Gallay, Donna Guy, Barbara Hanawalt, Steven Kern, Geoffrey Parker, and Dale Van Kley--is now almost complete.
Peter finished his remarks and I filled them in on the military history program: the faculty, the number and type of grad students, the audiences for military history and the ways in which our program addressed each. Because their brother was active duty military, I laid special emphasis on the fact that we train officers who will teach at the various service academies and that all of the faculty can and do engage with the armed forces and the strategic policy-making community.
Before the meeting we'd been told the Benefactors planned to give the military history program $500,000--enough to endow a graduate student fellowship. It turned out that each sister controlled half of the inheritance and, since Maureen agreed to match Molly's $500,000 offer, we got $1,000,000, enough for two fellowships. And what else would be of use to the program? Peter instantly suggested that an endowed professorship would allow us to hire an additional top-flight scholar, who would in turn help us to attract the very best grad students. The amount currently required to endow such a professorship, he continued, was $1.5 million. The Benefactor sisters chatted briefly across the table and agreed to give an additional amount sufficient to endow a professorship. Thus, by the time the meeting adjourned, the military history program stood to get $2.5 million.
Not bad for hitting the reply button when a generous donation offer hits your in-box.
By answering your email when someone offers your organization millions of dollars.
Some months ago a woman living in my home state of Ohio unexpectedly inherited a substantial estate when two of her relatives passed away. (Apparently she had no idea the relatives were so wealthy, so the inheritance came as a considerable shock.) The woman decided that part of the inheritance--several million dollars--should be given to charity, and she gave her two daughters the job of choosing suitable charitable causes and handling the actual transfers. As people who value higher education, the daughters approached several colleges and universities. They did so, straightforwardly enough, by going to the web sites of various such institutions and emailing the appropriate offices to express their interest in making a bequest.
Several places, they discovered, didn't even so much as hit the reply button to ask if they really meant it.
Luckily for Ohio State, a development officer working for our university got such an email--which, trust me, is an unusual way to hear of a potential bequest of that magnitude--and did hit the reply button. Which set in motion a chain of events that culminated last week in a meeting between myself, the heir, her two daughters, my colleague Peter Hahn, and several OSU development officers with a holy-cow-we've-hit-the-jackpot gleam in their eyes.
The heir and her daughters--I'll call them, respectively, Mary, Molly, and Maureen Benefactor--were pleasant and utterly down-to-earth. I have had enough involvement with development matters to know that usually people who make sizeable bequests do so only after an elaborate courtship by the university. The courtship generally involves a series of meetings and dinners with important university officials and dog-and-pony shows in which professors like me give special presentations designed to showcase the talents of the faculty--the talk I gave in October on "The Long Shadow of Sherman's March" was just such a presentation. The courtship often goes on for months, frequently a couple of years, before the potential donor is ready to sign on the dotted line.
The Benefactor family weren't like this. They had something they had decided to do and they just wanted to do it. Mary sat quietly while Molly and Maureen talked briefly about the bequests they had made earlier that morning to the veterinary school and to physical anthropology--as OSU alumni they had had earlier personal involvements with both entities. They were also interested in making a bequest to history--military history, to be exact--as a way to honor their brother who is an officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
I was in the room for obvious reasons. Peter was there in his capacity as department Vice Chair--the Chair himself would have been at the meeting except that he was out of the country. Peter talked a few minutes about the strengths of our department, noting, for example, that it was one of a handful of departments at OSU to win a Selective Investment grant: an award of several million dollars given by the university to departments identified as being so close to the top tier of excellence at the national level that an infusion of a few senior faculty hires would vault them into that tier. We got such a grant a few years ago. The infusion process--which has gotten us the likes of Kevin Boyle, Cynthia Brokaw, John Brooke, Alice Conklin, David Cressy, Alan Gallay, Donna Guy, Barbara Hanawalt, Steven Kern, Geoffrey Parker, and Dale Van Kley--is now almost complete.
Peter finished his remarks and I filled them in on the military history program: the faculty, the number and type of grad students, the audiences for military history and the ways in which our program addressed each. Because their brother was active duty military, I laid special emphasis on the fact that we train officers who will teach at the various service academies and that all of the faculty can and do engage with the armed forces and the strategic policy-making community.
Before the meeting we'd been told the Benefactors planned to give the military history program $500,000--enough to endow a graduate student fellowship. It turned out that each sister controlled half of the inheritance and, since Maureen agreed to match Molly's $500,000 offer, we got $1,000,000, enough for two fellowships. And what else would be of use to the program? Peter instantly suggested that an endowed professorship would allow us to hire an additional top-flight scholar, who would in turn help us to attract the very best grad students. The amount currently required to endow such a professorship, he continued, was $1.5 million. The Benefactor sisters chatted briefly across the table and agreed to give an additional amount sufficient to endow a professorship. Thus, by the time the meeting adjourned, the military history program stood to get $2.5 million.
Not bad for hitting the reply button when a generous donation offer hits your in-box.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
On the Road
I'm out of town for a few days to spend Christmas with friends. A heavy snowstorm was creeping up from the south, so I got on the road at 4 a.m. Just before I did I sent a brief email to Tom Barnett:
I didn't really expect a reply any time soon, especially having noticed that Tom's web site had crashed from the deluge of hits and emails after his CSPAN broadcast, but to my surprise I found a couple of quick responses awaiting me when I checked my account this afternoon:
I'm writing this from a Holiday Inn in Champaign, Illinois. I decided to break my trip here for two reasons. First, it's roughly halfway to my destination. Second, it's the home of my friend John Lynn, who teaches here at the University of Illinois.
I found him at home, totting up the final grades for his autumn semester classes. We had a good, long visit--an enjoyable conversation in his newly-finished "Florida room" followed by lunch at a local Thai restaurant. We talked almost nothing but shop. He filled me in on his doings and I told him about the recent Mershon conference. I mentioned particularly the panelists' consensus that the Society for Military History appeared uninterested in furthering military history as an academic field. Initially he was a little puzzled by this, but after a while he acknowledged how things could seem that way from my perspective--though as a candidate for vice president of the SMH he thought I had reason for hope.
We talked briefly about what might be done intellectually to advance the field but focused mainly on what the SMH could do to create more academic positions in military history. We knew that few history departments would do this of their own accord. Indeed, the record at Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere is that when existing military historians retire they are not replaced. The programs simply disappear. Nor, in John's experience, did departments seem receptive to the idea of accepting external funding to endow chairs in the field. In effect, departments wouldn't add a military history faculty line even if it cost them nothing.
But this impression turned out to be primarily an extrapolation from John's dealings with his own department, which by any measure is a department unusually taken with the new cultural history and unusually cool to everything else. It also turned at the external funding was theoretical, not actual. I thought things would turn out differently if a department was confronted with, say, $2 million in cash.
John remained skeptical until I suggested that the SMH should employ a development officer of its own to go forth, locate, and cultivate Dick and Jane Q. Benefactor. You can't swing a cat in a country club without hitting some wealthy businessman with an interest in military history. Moreover, in a country dominated by what Robert Reich calls "rad conservatives," where university departmental budgets are increasingly based on student enrollment, and where administrators have adapted themselves to both realities, I figured if you could get the bucks, you could get more than enough leverage to cram a military history position down the throat of the most granola-besotted department in the country. And if you couldn't do it among the top tier of universities, you could assuredly do it in the second-tier.
If nothing else, John agreed, that approach might populate the field with enough military historians for it to reach critical mass: a big problem right now is that there simply aren't enough academic military historians to be in real conversation with one another, to have the debates and steady historiographical growth characteristic of other fields. But on the whole John thought you'd get the most advantage from seeding military history positions in the top departments, and the idea of an SMH development officer captured his imagination. He wants to corral some of the Society's senior leadership at the next annual meeting and explore this idea further.
Will it work? I don't know. I do know that it's high time we began thinking strategically about how to establish the field. That, contrary to a myth much cherished among the white males of my profession, is how fields such as women's history and African American history got established. Political, diplomatic, social, and intellectual historians didn't just welcome them in. They scrambled; they elbowed their way to a place at the table. We must do the same.
John and I moved on to other subjects, among them the current state of affairs in Iraq. Which led me to mention The Pentagon's New Map to him. He hadn't heard of it, but found my brief sketch of Tom Barnett's ideas intriguing, and we dropped by a local bookstore so he could buy a copy. Then we wished one another a Merry Christmas. He headed back to his grading. I sought my bed at the Holiday Inn.
Hi Tom (if I may),
Some weeks ago, a friend of mine in the Pentagon mentioned that PNM was becoming in vogue there. I picked up a copy and was able to read it in time to use your Core/Gap model as the basis for the lectures in my History of War course dealing with 9/11 and the Iraq War. Not that I necessarily agree with you, but I certainly thought you made a more coherent case for Iraqi Freedom than did the Bush administration. I also watched your CSPAN presentation last evening--very well done. I didn't catch the Q&A--I couldn't really hang in there after the Zionist conspiracy question that kicked things off--but I have it on tape and will watch that later.
I'm ducking out in a few minutes to get on the road ahead of a snowstorm headed this way, but wanted to take a moment to say hi and to let you know that I'm putting together a grant request to support a conference to discuss your ideas among several military historians. You can find the particulars on my blog site. You'll find the relevant entries grouped under "History of War in Global Perspective."
I'd love to discuss this further when you have a chance.
Best,
Mark
PS - If you've not already done so, you really ought to read John Mueller's The Remnants of War. I think his work meshes very well with yours.
I didn't really expect a reply any time soon, especially having noticed that Tom's web site had crashed from the deluge of hits and emails after his CSPAN broadcast, but to my surprise I found a couple of quick responses awaiting me when I checked my account this afternoon:
Like Mueller a lot, so will try.Good luck on your grant.
Second point. I am writing the second book in January, and will come up for air in mid-Feb. Let me know how things progress.
I'm writing this from a Holiday Inn in Champaign, Illinois. I decided to break my trip here for two reasons. First, it's roughly halfway to my destination. Second, it's the home of my friend John Lynn, who teaches here at the University of Illinois.
I found him at home, totting up the final grades for his autumn semester classes. We had a good, long visit--an enjoyable conversation in his newly-finished "Florida room" followed by lunch at a local Thai restaurant. We talked almost nothing but shop. He filled me in on his doings and I told him about the recent Mershon conference. I mentioned particularly the panelists' consensus that the Society for Military History appeared uninterested in furthering military history as an academic field. Initially he was a little puzzled by this, but after a while he acknowledged how things could seem that way from my perspective--though as a candidate for vice president of the SMH he thought I had reason for hope.
We talked briefly about what might be done intellectually to advance the field but focused mainly on what the SMH could do to create more academic positions in military history. We knew that few history departments would do this of their own accord. Indeed, the record at Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere is that when existing military historians retire they are not replaced. The programs simply disappear. Nor, in John's experience, did departments seem receptive to the idea of accepting external funding to endow chairs in the field. In effect, departments wouldn't add a military history faculty line even if it cost them nothing.
But this impression turned out to be primarily an extrapolation from John's dealings with his own department, which by any measure is a department unusually taken with the new cultural history and unusually cool to everything else. It also turned at the external funding was theoretical, not actual. I thought things would turn out differently if a department was confronted with, say, $2 million in cash.
John remained skeptical until I suggested that the SMH should employ a development officer of its own to go forth, locate, and cultivate Dick and Jane Q. Benefactor. You can't swing a cat in a country club without hitting some wealthy businessman with an interest in military history. Moreover, in a country dominated by what Robert Reich calls "rad conservatives," where university departmental budgets are increasingly based on student enrollment, and where administrators have adapted themselves to both realities, I figured if you could get the bucks, you could get more than enough leverage to cram a military history position down the throat of the most granola-besotted department in the country. And if you couldn't do it among the top tier of universities, you could assuredly do it in the second-tier.
If nothing else, John agreed, that approach might populate the field with enough military historians for it to reach critical mass: a big problem right now is that there simply aren't enough academic military historians to be in real conversation with one another, to have the debates and steady historiographical growth characteristic of other fields. But on the whole John thought you'd get the most advantage from seeding military history positions in the top departments, and the idea of an SMH development officer captured his imagination. He wants to corral some of the Society's senior leadership at the next annual meeting and explore this idea further.
Will it work? I don't know. I do know that it's high time we began thinking strategically about how to establish the field. That, contrary to a myth much cherished among the white males of my profession, is how fields such as women's history and African American history got established. Political, diplomatic, social, and intellectual historians didn't just welcome them in. They scrambled; they elbowed their way to a place at the table. We must do the same.
John and I moved on to other subjects, among them the current state of affairs in Iraq. Which led me to mention The Pentagon's New Map to him. He hadn't heard of it, but found my brief sketch of Tom Barnett's ideas intriguing, and we dropped by a local bookstore so he could buy a copy. Then we wished one another a Merry Christmas. He headed back to his grading. I sought my bed at the Holiday Inn.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Because Ralph Would Have Wanted It That Way
For the past ten days I've been asking people if they've read The Pentagon's New Map and, if so, what they think of it. Most have heard of it, at least vaguely. Many have read reviews of it. One person owned a copy but said he couldn't really get into it. In pretty much every case the sense people had was of something slick, superficial, unconvincing, and not really worthy of engagement. Pressed to supply his own view of the book, the friend at the Pentagon who originally clued me in to its existence wrote:
It's also true that you can get 95 percent of the book from watching the presentation. I haven't seen the National Defense University presentation, but last evening I did watch a 90-minute, 30-slide version of the presentation on C-SPAN (which Barnett, incidentally, considered an improvement on the NDU version). It's currently available on C-SPAN in streaming video and will be rebroadcast on December 26 at 4 p.m. It's worth seeing. Barnett has a real gift for the oral presentation, and he's an artist with PowerPoint.
It's also true that Barnett "is an entertainer, with all that implies." Having myself occasionally been accused of being an entertainer in the classroom, I don't necessarily consider the term an epithet. Barnett has a vision of the future of national security, he's trying to lodge that vision in the heads of those who can make it happen, and from endless repetition has pinpointed the images, epigrams, and metaphors that drive home his points most readily. It's really quite astonishing how much information, conceptualization, and interpretation he can pack into 90 minutes without losing his audience.
Barnett puts it this way in his latest blog entry:
In an oral presentation, however, to "complicate" and "problematize" is often the same as to "confuse" and "stupify." And if you're going to write a mainstream book intended to lay out a case and convince a reader, the scholarly hesitation and qualification characteristic of my profession just won't fly.
As to the balance of my Pentagon friend's assessment: even Barnett would probably concede that the book contains 15,000 words of "self-aggrandizement." Barnett deals out the pronoun "I" the way other people deal out commas. But another way to see it is that Barnett avoids the "God trick." He isn't the magisterial voice of a presumptive objectivity. Like Lilian Friedberg, he places himself in the narrative. You never forget for a minute that you're getting the views of a forty-something strategic analyst with an audience to impress and a mortgage to pay. Personally I find that refreshing.
Similarly, I can't find it in myself to fret that The Pentagon's Map is being widely read within the Pentagon. For one thing, it's reassuring to know that people in the Pentagon actually read books. But more importantly, it creates a framework for engagement. You can dismiss the book if you want, but right now I think it would be more useful to talk back to it. If it's too simple in places, explain why--and offer a better interpretation. If it's an inch deep, encourage the author to dig deeper. Or better, use PNM as a point of departure and do for it what, in the nature of the case, it can't really do for itself. Barnett can't very well push PNM and critique it, both at the same time. That's someone else's job.
The question is, is it worth making it my job?
You can divide this into two component questions.
First, is any sort of public engagement worth the time and energy involved?
On this score I've always been mindful of the illusion of influence. Usually the people you're trying to influence have already charted their own direction and embrace your work principally if it serves as an argument in favor of what they plan to do anyway. Barnett can push PNM with the zeal of a dope dealer but it doesn't mean anyone with real clout will mainline it. They're more likely to cut it and re-sell it to whatever group and in whatever way will further their own interests.
I once spent a summer at RAND Corporation researching European collaborative aircraft programs--the Jaguar, Tornado and Alpha Jet programs. Supposedly this was to be "objective," but really it was to help make the (futile) case that the Europeans should scrap the EFA and Rafale projects and buy our F-16Cs instead. I candidly didn't give a shit. I got to spend three months in Santa Monica and make several times my grad student stipend and I had no complaints. But a good friend of mine who went to work as a CIA analyst eventually left in frustration when his reports, which concluded in effect that such-and-such was "white," were revised so that white became first "beige," then "grayish-white," and not infrequently ended up "coal black." It's one thing to do this sort of thing on summer break. It's another thing to make it a significant chunk of your life's work.
That said, to some degree I already answered this question affirmatively when I let the Mershon Center give me a second campus office and, more importantly, buy me out of one course each year. The benefit to me is that it gives me a six-month on, six-month off teaching schedule. The expectation from Mershon is that I'll actively work to further its mission: "to advance the scholarly study and intellectual understanding of national security in a global context." This doesn't actually require me to get involved in public as opposed to purely academic engagement, but public was plainly the sort of engagement Ralph D. Mershon had in mind when he made his bequest to OSU.
C'mon! Could you refuse a face like that?
Second, is PNM specifically worthy of engagement?
One could argue that it is, simply because it's getting such play inside the Beltway. But it certainly isn't the only book getting play; there are easily a dozen books out there that, in one way or another, are prominently involved in the current national security discussion. What appeals to me about PNM is its attempt to link globalization to military affairs. This harmonizes well with the global history of war initiative, not just in terms of globalization but also in terms of its call for the armed forces to adopt a much broader definition of war. Barnett is as impatient as I am with the Pentagon's application of the acronym MOOTW--"Military Operations Other Than War"--to describe most of what it actually does in the current threat environment. Nobody says this in so many words any more, but the current Iraqi occupation corresponds, in most respects, to MOOTW. The "March to Baghdad" that claimed 140 American lives was real war. The occupation that has so far claimed over 1100 American lives--and probably ten times that many Iraqi civilians-- is part of the "post-conflict" phase.
I suppose I could worry, as one of my respondents did--in a very thoughtful email, by the way--that a project like this would be "presentist," and might well result in a forced, artificial use of the past: a set of raids on history to endorse or query PNM. I think if you take at face value Barnett's conception of globalization this would likely be the result. As this respondent pointed out, it not only takes a constricted view of globalization as essentially a post-1870 development, it also smuggles in the old, largely-discredited "modernization" theory whereby all societies are supposed to pass through the same stages of development in pretty much the same way. Part of the job would be to critique Barnett's model of globalization and ask what implications a different model would have for his national security prescriptions.
The other part--or at least one other part--would be to critically assess the prescription itself, which is essentially a call for the United States to field two kinds of armed forces: a "Leviathan" force to kick the crap out of the Saddam Husseins of the world, and a "Systems Administration" force adapted to the tasks of occupation, stabilization, and the restoration of normal law and order in the countries thus freed of their rogue leadership. Actually, to the extent that one is going to use military force, a good, robust, well-trained "Sys Admin" force sounds very plausible. But in the first place, it's a real question whether the use of military force, Leviathan or Sys Admin, doesn't create more problems than it solves. (The longer I study war, the more convinced I become that violence solves one problem at the cost of creating others--hopefully smaller and more manageable, but often just as serious as the initial one and occasionally a hell of a lot worse.) And in the second, it's worth realizing that a Sys Admin war is still a war, and any adversary will systematically try to thwart and overthrow such an effort. This isn't an argument against a Sys Admin force. It's a suggestion that previous "low intensity" conflicts need to be examined in new ways.
For instance, what would the United States do if a principled, nonviolent movement emerged in Iraq that insisted upon Shi'ite majority rule and the establishment of an explicitly Shi'ite state with close ties to Iran? A Sys Admin force could perhaps prevail against a bunch of bomb throwers. But against a Gandhian satyagraha campaign? Such a development sounds unlikely. But so did terrorists toppling the World Trade Center. So I think it's worth the thought experiment. And really, what could we do to counter such a thing?
Finally, it's worth recalling the fruits of my own involvement, years ago, with another hot idea then making the rounds of the Pentagon: RMAs--Revolutions in Military Affairs--which promised to banish the fog of war and give us a lean, qualitatively superior military capable of beating a much larger adversary by way of an asymmetrical advantage in information technology. My mentor Wick Murray was aghast--well, Wick doesn't get aghast, let's say outraged--at the historical myopia of such a view. In 1996 he put together a conference at the Marine Corps University in which a succession of historians--me included--reviewed other RMAs from the Hundred Years War to World War II in order to show how true RMAs were almost never merely technological but rather the result of much larger political, sociocultural, and economic factors. My own presentation focused on the American Civil War as an example of armed forces not so much harnessing an RMA as trying to survive the RMA of people's war.
It was actually a pretty clever presentation, and fundamentally correct. Even so, during the Q&A that followed a Marine major acknowledged my basic point but wondered if there wasn't any way by which one side during the Civil War enjoyed an asymmetrical advantage over the other. Abruptly it occurred to me that the Federal government did a much better job of financing its war effort--the huge Northern manufacturing advantage was a latent advantage, useless unless the Federal government could find a way to pay for the weapons and equipment it could yield. The sweeping re-imagination of financial policy--the artful mix of greenbacks, bonds, and taxes developed by government policymakers and private financiers between 1862 and 1864--resulted in what one historian has called a "fiscal-military revolution." I had never really appreciated this before, nor had I studied it closely. My engagement with the "presentist" RMA agenda wound up making me a better Civil War historian. I have a hunch that engaging with PNM will yield similar benefits for me as a global historian of war.
PS - That 1996 conference resulted in a volume of essays: The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, which is now on the U.S. Army Chief of Staff's professional reading list.
Barnett's book, while interesting at some level, is an inch deep. It is essentially a 75 slide powerpoint presentation converted to words, with about 15,000 words of self-aggrandizement added in for filler. Readable, but annoying at some level. You'd do better to order from CSPAN their tape (in DVD if you want) of his 2 hour powerpoint presentation given this past summer at the National Defense University. Exactly same content, much faster to consume. He is an entertainer, with all that implies. The sad thing is that it is widely read here. Punditocracy has arrived in the Pentagon.Actually, if you set aside the deprecatory appraisal for a moment, this is a pretty astute and unexceptionable description. It really is a PowerPoint presentation converted to words, as Barnett himself makes clear. The author has given this presentation more than 400 times to various military, policymaking, and think tank audiences, and eventually concluded that it had become so much sought-after that it deserved to reach a wider audience.
It's also true that you can get 95 percent of the book from watching the presentation. I haven't seen the National Defense University presentation, but last evening I did watch a 90-minute, 30-slide version of the presentation on C-SPAN (which Barnett, incidentally, considered an improvement on the NDU version). It's currently available on C-SPAN in streaming video and will be rebroadcast on December 26 at 4 p.m. It's worth seeing. Barnett has a real gift for the oral presentation, and he's an artist with PowerPoint.
It's also true that Barnett "is an entertainer, with all that implies." Having myself occasionally been accused of being an entertainer in the classroom, I don't necessarily consider the term an epithet. Barnett has a vision of the future of national security, he's trying to lodge that vision in the heads of those who can make it happen, and from endless repetition has pinpointed the images, epigrams, and metaphors that drive home his points most readily. It's really quite astonishing how much information, conceptualization, and interpretation he can pack into 90 minutes without losing his audience.
Barnett puts it this way in his latest blog entry:
[CSPAN host Steve] Scully asked me last night, "Has this become a career for you?" And the answer is, "Of course it has." But the career is determined by two factors: 1) the reproducibility of the strategic concepts (their essential utility); 2) the reach of the message. These are self-reinforcing in a network sense: the more I interact with the world at large, the better I tailor the concepts for their reproducibility (meaning the easier it is for a wide range of minds to instantly "get" what I'm talking about), and the better tailored the concepts, the wider the reach of the network. In short, I am constantly improving both reach and richness—the ultimate feat in marketing.What this means, inevitably, is that he simplifies in the interest of "reproducibility," and if you have an academic temperament this lust for simplification can drive you nuts. Academics will occasionally praise a simple interpretation as "elegant," but more commonly will condemn it as "simplistic." Two of the most common verbs I hear in academic presentations are "complicate"--as in "I want to complicate the narrative of thus-and-such"--and "problematize," which, if clumsy, is at least self-explanatory.
In an oral presentation, however, to "complicate" and "problematize" is often the same as to "confuse" and "stupify." And if you're going to write a mainstream book intended to lay out a case and convince a reader, the scholarly hesitation and qualification characteristic of my profession just won't fly.
As to the balance of my Pentagon friend's assessment: even Barnett would probably concede that the book contains 15,000 words of "self-aggrandizement." Barnett deals out the pronoun "I" the way other people deal out commas. But another way to see it is that Barnett avoids the "God trick." He isn't the magisterial voice of a presumptive objectivity. Like Lilian Friedberg, he places himself in the narrative. You never forget for a minute that you're getting the views of a forty-something strategic analyst with an audience to impress and a mortgage to pay. Personally I find that refreshing.
Similarly, I can't find it in myself to fret that The Pentagon's Map is being widely read within the Pentagon. For one thing, it's reassuring to know that people in the Pentagon actually read books. But more importantly, it creates a framework for engagement. You can dismiss the book if you want, but right now I think it would be more useful to talk back to it. If it's too simple in places, explain why--and offer a better interpretation. If it's an inch deep, encourage the author to dig deeper. Or better, use PNM as a point of departure and do for it what, in the nature of the case, it can't really do for itself. Barnett can't very well push PNM and critique it, both at the same time. That's someone else's job.
The question is, is it worth making it my job?
You can divide this into two component questions.
First, is any sort of public engagement worth the time and energy involved?
On this score I've always been mindful of the illusion of influence. Usually the people you're trying to influence have already charted their own direction and embrace your work principally if it serves as an argument in favor of what they plan to do anyway. Barnett can push PNM with the zeal of a dope dealer but it doesn't mean anyone with real clout will mainline it. They're more likely to cut it and re-sell it to whatever group and in whatever way will further their own interests.
I once spent a summer at RAND Corporation researching European collaborative aircraft programs--the Jaguar, Tornado and Alpha Jet programs. Supposedly this was to be "objective," but really it was to help make the (futile) case that the Europeans should scrap the EFA and Rafale projects and buy our F-16Cs instead. I candidly didn't give a shit. I got to spend three months in Santa Monica and make several times my grad student stipend and I had no complaints. But a good friend of mine who went to work as a CIA analyst eventually left in frustration when his reports, which concluded in effect that such-and-such was "white," were revised so that white became first "beige," then "grayish-white," and not infrequently ended up "coal black." It's one thing to do this sort of thing on summer break. It's another thing to make it a significant chunk of your life's work.
That said, to some degree I already answered this question affirmatively when I let the Mershon Center give me a second campus office and, more importantly, buy me out of one course each year. The benefit to me is that it gives me a six-month on, six-month off teaching schedule. The expectation from Mershon is that I'll actively work to further its mission: "to advance the scholarly study and intellectual understanding of national security in a global context." This doesn't actually require me to get involved in public as opposed to purely academic engagement, but public was plainly the sort of engagement Ralph D. Mershon had in mind when he made his bequest to OSU.
C'mon! Could you refuse a face like that?
Second, is PNM specifically worthy of engagement?
One could argue that it is, simply because it's getting such play inside the Beltway. But it certainly isn't the only book getting play; there are easily a dozen books out there that, in one way or another, are prominently involved in the current national security discussion. What appeals to me about PNM is its attempt to link globalization to military affairs. This harmonizes well with the global history of war initiative, not just in terms of globalization but also in terms of its call for the armed forces to adopt a much broader definition of war. Barnett is as impatient as I am with the Pentagon's application of the acronym MOOTW--"Military Operations Other Than War"--to describe most of what it actually does in the current threat environment. Nobody says this in so many words any more, but the current Iraqi occupation corresponds, in most respects, to MOOTW. The "March to Baghdad" that claimed 140 American lives was real war. The occupation that has so far claimed over 1100 American lives--and probably ten times that many Iraqi civilians-- is part of the "post-conflict" phase.
I suppose I could worry, as one of my respondents did--in a very thoughtful email, by the way--that a project like this would be "presentist," and might well result in a forced, artificial use of the past: a set of raids on history to endorse or query PNM. I think if you take at face value Barnett's conception of globalization this would likely be the result. As this respondent pointed out, it not only takes a constricted view of globalization as essentially a post-1870 development, it also smuggles in the old, largely-discredited "modernization" theory whereby all societies are supposed to pass through the same stages of development in pretty much the same way. Part of the job would be to critique Barnett's model of globalization and ask what implications a different model would have for his national security prescriptions.
The other part--or at least one other part--would be to critically assess the prescription itself, which is essentially a call for the United States to field two kinds of armed forces: a "Leviathan" force to kick the crap out of the Saddam Husseins of the world, and a "Systems Administration" force adapted to the tasks of occupation, stabilization, and the restoration of normal law and order in the countries thus freed of their rogue leadership. Actually, to the extent that one is going to use military force, a good, robust, well-trained "Sys Admin" force sounds very plausible. But in the first place, it's a real question whether the use of military force, Leviathan or Sys Admin, doesn't create more problems than it solves. (The longer I study war, the more convinced I become that violence solves one problem at the cost of creating others--hopefully smaller and more manageable, but often just as serious as the initial one and occasionally a hell of a lot worse.) And in the second, it's worth realizing that a Sys Admin war is still a war, and any adversary will systematically try to thwart and overthrow such an effort. This isn't an argument against a Sys Admin force. It's a suggestion that previous "low intensity" conflicts need to be examined in new ways.
For instance, what would the United States do if a principled, nonviolent movement emerged in Iraq that insisted upon Shi'ite majority rule and the establishment of an explicitly Shi'ite state with close ties to Iran? A Sys Admin force could perhaps prevail against a bunch of bomb throwers. But against a Gandhian satyagraha campaign? Such a development sounds unlikely. But so did terrorists toppling the World Trade Center. So I think it's worth the thought experiment. And really, what could we do to counter such a thing?
Finally, it's worth recalling the fruits of my own involvement, years ago, with another hot idea then making the rounds of the Pentagon: RMAs--Revolutions in Military Affairs--which promised to banish the fog of war and give us a lean, qualitatively superior military capable of beating a much larger adversary by way of an asymmetrical advantage in information technology. My mentor Wick Murray was aghast--well, Wick doesn't get aghast, let's say outraged--at the historical myopia of such a view. In 1996 he put together a conference at the Marine Corps University in which a succession of historians--me included--reviewed other RMAs from the Hundred Years War to World War II in order to show how true RMAs were almost never merely technological but rather the result of much larger political, sociocultural, and economic factors. My own presentation focused on the American Civil War as an example of armed forces not so much harnessing an RMA as trying to survive the RMA of people's war.
It was actually a pretty clever presentation, and fundamentally correct. Even so, during the Q&A that followed a Marine major acknowledged my basic point but wondered if there wasn't any way by which one side during the Civil War enjoyed an asymmetrical advantage over the other. Abruptly it occurred to me that the Federal government did a much better job of financing its war effort--the huge Northern manufacturing advantage was a latent advantage, useless unless the Federal government could find a way to pay for the weapons and equipment it could yield. The sweeping re-imagination of financial policy--the artful mix of greenbacks, bonds, and taxes developed by government policymakers and private financiers between 1862 and 1864--resulted in what one historian has called a "fiscal-military revolution." I had never really appreciated this before, nor had I studied it closely. My engagement with the "presentist" RMA agenda wound up making me a better Civil War historian. I have a hunch that engaging with PNM will yield similar benefits for me as a global historian of war.
PS - That 1996 conference resulted in a volume of essays: The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, which is now on the U.S. Army Chief of Staff's professional reading list.
According to the list:
The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050. Edited by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray
The editors provide a conceptual framework and historical context for understanding the patterns of change, innovation, and adaptation that have marked war in the Western world since the fourteenth century. Case studies and a conceptual overview offer to all senior leaders an indispensable introduction to military change.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Making the World Safe for Globalization
In a previous entry, I broached the possibility that Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map might be a useful point of departure for a future global history of war conference. In this entry I'd like to start exploring that possibility more fully. The blog format doesn't really lend itself to extended discussions, so this exploration will be on the installment plan. (If you want to do a reconnaissance of your own, you can check out the reviews of the book, all of them reprinted, with Barnett's comments, on his web site.)
As I write this, I'm listening to a string of contemporary Middle Eastern musicians; e.g., Oum Kolsoum, Fairuz, and Khaled. Until a few hours ago I had heard of none of them, but their music now fills my office with flawless, digitized perfection. Of course, I haven't the slightest idea what they're singing about, but it's still way cool. More importantly, it makes me curious to know what they're singing about, and by extension, to know more about their cultures. This all comes courtesy of my broadband internet connection and a little phenomenon called globalization.
Globalization is quite the buzz word of the moment, but there's little agreement on what to make of it. Is it new? Many commentators talk as if it emerged only in the 1980s or 1990s; a few will push this back to the early 1900s. Those with a real sense of history see it as a process underway since the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration around the Cape of Good Hope and, especially, to the Americas. True gamesters place its origins even earlier. Janet Abu-Lughod, for instance, sees a global system as operating in Europe, Asia and Africa as early as 1250.
Is globalization good? The question's pointless, of course, if you take the long view: it's like asking whether history is good. But if you're talking about the current wave of globalization, it makes a bit more sense to ask if it's a good thing--or more precisely, for whom. Some see it as little more than neocolonialism; others as a process that, overall, is beneficial for every society that becomes enmeshed with it. This latter was the assessment of Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, whose key argument was nicely summarized by Paul Krugman in a review for Washington Monthly:
For him, the great enemy of the United States nowadays is not a particular power or a group of people but rather a condition--"disconnectedness" from the beneficial and therefore stabilizing influence of globalization.
On the latter score, for instance, what are we to make of this illustration from Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age?
(click map for closeup)
Here's a global system in which the world's largest economy is China. And of course everyone recalls the great Chinese fleets that roamed the world, policing and administering this system. Oh wait, maybe not. In any event, what illumination might this revisionist "new map" of the early modern world's global economy shed on "the Pentagon's new map," and vice versa? Is it in the nature of a cheap shot, or might reflection on these two maps yield something something worthwhile?
Current Affairs
As I write this, I'm listening to a string of contemporary Middle Eastern musicians; e.g., Oum Kolsoum, Fairuz, and Khaled. Until a few hours ago I had heard of none of them, but their music now fills my office with flawless, digitized perfection. Of course, I haven't the slightest idea what they're singing about, but it's still way cool. More importantly, it makes me curious to know what they're singing about, and by extension, to know more about their cultures. This all comes courtesy of my broadband internet connection and a little phenomenon called globalization.
Globalization is quite the buzz word of the moment, but there's little agreement on what to make of it. Is it new? Many commentators talk as if it emerged only in the 1980s or 1990s; a few will push this back to the early 1900s. Those with a real sense of history see it as a process underway since the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration around the Cape of Good Hope and, especially, to the Americas. True gamesters place its origins even earlier. Janet Abu-Lughod, for instance, sees a global system as operating in Europe, Asia and Africa as early as 1250.
Is globalization good? The question's pointless, of course, if you take the long view: it's like asking whether history is good. But if you're talking about the current wave of globalization, it makes a bit more sense to ask if it's a good thing--or more precisely, for whom. Some see it as little more than neocolonialism; others as a process that, overall, is beneficial for every society that becomes enmeshed with it. This latter was the assessment of Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, whose key argument was nicely summarized by Paul Krugman in a review for Washington Monthly:
Information technology, [Frieman] tells us, has made the world a small place, in which ideas and money can move almost instantly across borders. This smaller world richly rewards countries and societies that meet its needs--which is to say places that have strong property rights, open minds, and a flexible attitude; but it inflicts devastating punishment on those who fail to live up to global standards. Old-fashioned power politics is becoming increasingly obsolete because it conflicts with the imperatives of global capitalism. We are heading for a world that is basically democratic, because you can't keep 'em down on the farm once they have Internet access, and basically peaceful, because George Soros will pull out his money if you rattle your saber.Krugman himself was skeptical about the accuracy of Friedman's analysis and the inevitability of this future (particularly whether it would play out in such a positive way). Friedman seems to have acquired a bit of skepticism himself after September 11. But it's this view of globalization that Barnett places at the heart of The Pentagon's New Map. With one key difference. Whereas Friedman saw the spread of globalization and its benefits as more or less automatic, Barnett sees it as contingent upon the willingness of the United States to safeguard globalization and ensure that its promise is realized.
For him, the great enemy of the United States nowadays is not a particular power or a group of people but rather a condition--"disconnectedness" from the beneficial and therefore stabilizing influence of globalization.
To be disconnected in this world is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated. For young women, it means being kept--quite literally in many instances--barefoot and pregnant. For young men, it means being kept ignorant and bored and malleable. For the masses, being disconnected means a lack of choice and scarce access to ideas, capital, travel, entertainment, and loved ones overseas. For the elite, maintaining disconnectedness means control and the ability to hoard wealth, especially that generated by the exportation of raw materials.If globalization were to falter, the biggest loser would be the United States, not only because it has the world's largest economy but also because it embodies "the political idea most closely associated with globalization's promise and peril."
If this disconnectedness is the real enemy, then the combatants we target in this war are those who promote it, enforce it, and terrorize those who seek to overcome it by reaching out to the larger world. Our strategic goals, therefore, are to extend connectivity in every way possible, but only in a manner that promotes justice as much as order. Because when we sacrifice, when we suffer, and when we die in this war, we must know that the good we promote is both immediate and lasting. Americans need the confidence of knowing that every difficult step we take represents forward progress on some level.
To that end, we need to understand what is really at stake here, which is nothing less than the future of globalization itself. You may say that globalization is not a goal or a strategy but simply a condition of the world we live in, and you would be right on many levels. But globalization is also a historical process, or something that is defined by a sense of momentum and purpose. Globalization has a past, which defines its limits, but likewise a future whose promise it must fulfill, otherwise it will become a spent notion in the minds of political leaders whose determined actions are required for its continued advance.
Whether we realize it or not, America serves as the ideological wellspring for globalization. These united states will stand as the first concrete expression. We are the only country in the world purposely built around the ideals that animate globalization's advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of movement, freedom of expression. We are connectivity personified. Globalization is this country's gift to history--the most perfectly flawed projection of the American Dream onto the global landscape. To deny our parentage of globalization is to deny our country's profound role as world leader over the second half of the twentieth century. More important, to abandon globalization's future to those violent forces hell-bent on keeping this world divided between the connected and disconnected is to admit that we no longer hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, and that all desire life, liberty, and a chance to pursue happiness. In short, we the people needs to become we the planet.This is nothing if not idealistic, but I don't mind someone who takes ideas seriously. Still, one has to ask if Barnett's analysis of globalization is accurate or complete. In particular, does the success of globalization really require the intervention of a well-intentioned major power? And if so, is the sort of intervention Barnett has in mind appropriate and likely to succeed? Finally, what insights into all of these questions can be gleaned from history?
On the latter score, for instance, what are we to make of this illustration from Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age?
(click map for closeup)
Here's a global system in which the world's largest economy is China. And of course everyone recalls the great Chinese fleets that roamed the world, policing and administering this system. Oh wait, maybe not. In any event, what illumination might this revisionist "new map" of the early modern world's global economy shed on "the Pentagon's new map," and vice versa? Is it in the nature of a cheap shot, or might reflection on these two maps yield something something worthwhile?
Current Affairs
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Periodizing the History of War, Continued
Jenni was fighting a cold and couldn't make today's meeting; she passed the rest of us her preferred course offerings by email. But Allan, Joe and I got together and in about forty-five minutes hammered out a schedule for next year. More importantly for present purposes, we came up with a way to recast History 580. We eliminated "European Warfare" from the course title, substituted "Global History of War," and agreed on a three-quarter sequence:
580.01 Global History of War, 378 AD to 1763
580.02 Global History of War, 1763-1900
580.03 Global History of War, 1900-Present
Bering in mind the existence of History 504.01, War in the Ancient Medierranean World, which ends with the fall of Rome (ca. 410-476 CE), History 580.01 picks up with the defeat of Rome at Adrianople and addresses the role of war within the first two waves of globalization: the rise of Islam, which resulted in a much greater degree of interconnection between Europe and Asia; and the European explosion of maritime exploration, trade, and colonization in the 16th-18th centuries. We selected 1763 as the endpoint because it was the terminus date of the Seven Years' War, often called the world's first global war.
History 580.02 deals with the rise and heyday of the second wave of globalization, which saw the rise and spread of industrialization and a second spurt of European colonization, culminating in European control of over 80 percent of the earth's land surface by 1900.
History 580.03 deals with the European civil war (1914-1945) that destroyed European hegemony, the emergence of a bipolar world, and the wars of decolonization.
While the specific date parameters are drawn largely from the "triumph of the west" model of military history, we made sure the general periodizations lent themselves to other metanarratives. For instance, an interpretation that emphasized the rise of modern Asia might tweak the end point of 580.02 from 1900 to 1905 (the year of the Russo-Japanese War), or the starting point of 580.03 from 1900 to 1868 (the year of the Meiji Restoration). To underscore this point, the final set of course titles may use slightly different datings. We all knew that the actual periodization of a given course almost never follows, except roughly, the periodization in the course catalog. The important thing was to create intellectual space to do history of war in global perspective without forcing an instructor into some particular interpretive framework.
580.01 Global History of War, 378 AD to 1763
580.02 Global History of War, 1763-1900
580.03 Global History of War, 1900-Present
Bering in mind the existence of History 504.01, War in the Ancient Medierranean World, which ends with the fall of Rome (ca. 410-476 CE), History 580.01 picks up with the defeat of Rome at Adrianople and addresses the role of war within the first two waves of globalization: the rise of Islam, which resulted in a much greater degree of interconnection between Europe and Asia; and the European explosion of maritime exploration, trade, and colonization in the 16th-18th centuries. We selected 1763 as the endpoint because it was the terminus date of the Seven Years' War, often called the world's first global war.
History 580.02 deals with the rise and heyday of the second wave of globalization, which saw the rise and spread of industrialization and a second spurt of European colonization, culminating in European control of over 80 percent of the earth's land surface by 1900.
History 580.03 deals with the European civil war (1914-1945) that destroyed European hegemony, the emergence of a bipolar world, and the wars of decolonization.
While the specific date parameters are drawn largely from the "triumph of the west" model of military history, we made sure the general periodizations lent themselves to other metanarratives. For instance, an interpretation that emphasized the rise of modern Asia might tweak the end point of 580.02 from 1900 to 1905 (the year of the Russo-Japanese War), or the starting point of 580.03 from 1900 to 1868 (the year of the Meiji Restoration). To underscore this point, the final set of course titles may use slightly different datings. We all knew that the actual periodization of a given course almost never follows, except roughly, the periodization in the course catalog. The important thing was to create intellectual space to do history of war in global perspective without forcing an instructor into some particular interpretive framework.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Periodizing the History of War
I circulated the last entry to my colleagues. Geoffrey responded:
Figuring out the time limits for any historical subject is always more subtle and complex than it would at first glance appear. Geoffrey's suggested periodization, for instance, would sharply reduce the scope for coverage of the two world wars. This would be a defensible but major change in the way military historians traditionally approach those subjects. The upside is that it would force us to take a longer view of both conflicts. Locating them between the wars of imperialism and the wars of decolonization would almost certainly suggest a different set of concerns and emphases than those we currently select. The downside is twofold. Intellectually, one wonders whether the presentation of the two world wars might become too abstract or idiosyncratic. Pragmatically, one would have to revise one's existing lectures on the wars so extensively that you might as well as do them de novo.
Geoffrey's suggestion also implicitly questions the tendency for surveys to look at the past through reverse binoculars. That is to say, historical eras closest to us are usually treated in far more detail than those which are more remote. For instance, the current 580 sequence allocates just 74 years to the second half, while the first half is expected to cover nearly 400 years. It's much the same in 582 (American military history): the first half covers about three centuries, the second half less than a third of that. History surveys in other fields follow the same pattern. The underlying assumption, of course, is that students need a more detailed understanding of the recent past. Like most assumptions, it's open to question, but I seriously doubt most historians would reject it.
I think that in the short run we may as well keep the temporal parameters of the 580 sequence pretty well in place, especially if we want parameters that would permit an instructor to select either a European or a global focus. If excising the word "European" from the course title is necesary to create room for the latter focus, retaining the current time limits is arguably best to allow the former focus to be handled coherently. As for a third, post-1945 course: we used to have such a course under the auspices of the now-defunct subject of National Security Policy Studies (NSPS was created back in the days when the Mershon Center involved itself with formal coursework). We could resurrect it as a History 594, Topics in History--a catch-all devised to allow instructors to experiment with a new course before putting it permanently on the books.
All that said, I think I'll pursue Geoffrey's parting suggestion: "Since John Lynn [of the University of Illinois] has experience of both the subject and of this department, why don't we ask his opinion?"
On the first big point, I like very much the idea of writing a course description that gives instructors the flexibility to approach the survey according to their own gifts and sense of what really matters. On the second, all I did was suggest a three-quarter sequence. The periodization Geoffrey outlines is Geoffrey's. But it raises some interesting questions.
- Thanks, Mark, for laying this out so clearly, and to Joe for sharing his concerns. I agree that "European warfare" is VERY restrictive and makes it hard to accomplish Mark's goal of globalization. I see two possible alternatives:
- 1. Leave the title alone and fudge. (Been there, done that.)
- 2. Submit a title and course outline change. It must *include* Europe -- I don't see a way of supporting, justifying or staffing an *additional* course on global history as well as American and European -- but its title could be amend to something like "The Western way of war and its enemies", which would leave each instructor free to weight the Western/non-Western components according to his/her choice. It would also encourage a debate on the Hanson theory -- and its enemies!
- Whether or not we do that, I think we must face the fact that (as Mark says) each year that passes increases the periods a course on "since XXXX" must cover. I like his case for a THREE quarter sequence in "West & the Rest" military history: one to circa 1450 (pre-colonies AND pre-decisive artillery); a second from then until circa 1830 (or if necessary 1850: pre-rapid colonization and pre-industrialization of war); a third "Since XXXX".
Figuring out the time limits for any historical subject is always more subtle and complex than it would at first glance appear. Geoffrey's suggested periodization, for instance, would sharply reduce the scope for coverage of the two world wars. This would be a defensible but major change in the way military historians traditionally approach those subjects. The upside is that it would force us to take a longer view of both conflicts. Locating them between the wars of imperialism and the wars of decolonization would almost certainly suggest a different set of concerns and emphases than those we currently select. The downside is twofold. Intellectually, one wonders whether the presentation of the two world wars might become too abstract or idiosyncratic. Pragmatically, one would have to revise one's existing lectures on the wars so extensively that you might as well as do them de novo.
Geoffrey's suggestion also implicitly questions the tendency for surveys to look at the past through reverse binoculars. That is to say, historical eras closest to us are usually treated in far more detail than those which are more remote. For instance, the current 580 sequence allocates just 74 years to the second half, while the first half is expected to cover nearly 400 years. It's much the same in 582 (American military history): the first half covers about three centuries, the second half less than a third of that. History surveys in other fields follow the same pattern. The underlying assumption, of course, is that students need a more detailed understanding of the recent past. Like most assumptions, it's open to question, but I seriously doubt most historians would reject it.
I think that in the short run we may as well keep the temporal parameters of the 580 sequence pretty well in place, especially if we want parameters that would permit an instructor to select either a European or a global focus. If excising the word "European" from the course title is necesary to create room for the latter focus, retaining the current time limits is arguably best to allow the former focus to be handled coherently. As for a third, post-1945 course: we used to have such a course under the auspices of the now-defunct subject of National Security Policy Studies (NSPS was created back in the days when the Mershon Center involved itself with formal coursework). We could resurrect it as a History 594, Topics in History--a catch-all devised to allow instructors to experiment with a new course before putting it permanently on the books.
All that said, I think I'll pursue Geoffrey's parting suggestion: "Since John Lynn [of the University of Illinois] has experience of both the subject and of this department, why don't we ask his opinion?"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)